PHOTOGRAPH courtesy of Cliff Harris

I watched a lot of pro football as a kid, sitting spellbound in front of our living room television in Upstate New York, addicted to a realm of almost cartoon violence.

Not crushing midfield hits, but the fumble scrums.

What kind of ungodly hell went on inside those man-muscled NFL piles before the black-and-whites, the whistle-blowing referees, moved in to separate those asteroid-sized bodies?

Fifty years later, I’m still curious. 

I pitched a story about fumble pile atrocities to the SB Nation sports website and, to their credit, (and my surprise) they liked it.

The piece was published last week. 

The whole experience was a hoot.

I spent weeks on the phone with old-school NFL veterans who populated those fumble scrums, in an era when football players seemed somehow more lethal and more colorful, their fumble antics the stuff of that classic sports flick “The Longest Yard.”

Unhinged.

In a rock ‘n’ roll, prison yard, poke out your eyeballs, kind of way.

Before I got started, I called an old friend and former colleague, a lifelong sports writer.

“That’s a good story,” he said. “But I think you’re going to have a hard time contacting those veterans.”

How come?

The NFL, players and referees associations, even the folks at the football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, he said, would most likely punt on the story.

And he was right. 

I called them all, numerous times.

Left messages.

Emailed them.

Begged, even.

Nope. Not a single call back. Not one. Thanks (for nothing) fellas.

But I got a little help from my friends.

Journalists are a tight-knit tribe, so I reached out to sports writers I’ve known at various newspapers. And unlike the bloody NFL, they generously opened their cell phones and coughed up plenty of numbers.

And so I telephoned retired players. A bunch of them.

In the coming weeks, I laughed out loud as the old pros told tales that made me squeamish, detailing stealthy jackhammer hits to the unmentionables at the bottom of the pile that had me instinctively reaching down to protect my privates.

I have never had so much fun reporting a story. I felt like a sports fan who’d run into one of his football heroes at the pub.

As long as I bought the pints, the wild stories rolled. 

Here’s how an average call went: I’d dial a player’s cell phone number. He’d pick up and I launched into my introduction, that I was a journalist writing a story for a sports website, yada, yada, yada.

All the while, I could feel his finger hovering over the disconnect button, ready to drop-kick this latest phone pest, until I got to the punch line:

“So, I’m wondering, what happened down there inside all those crazy fumble piles?

There’d be a pause, most often followed by an evil little laugh.

“Oh, I could tell you some stories!”

And so they did.

Man, did they ever.

But not all of the funny bits made it into the story, so here are a few gems from the cutting room, ahem, locker room floor.

Like a player who happens upon a fumble, I got lucky from the start.

One of my sportswriting buddies offered up an old-school treasure trove from the days of the Dallas Cowboys’ Doomsday Defense: Bob Lilly, Lee Roy Jordan and Cliff Harris.

For starters, Bob Lilly was a first-rate gentleman. I chatted with his wife to set up our call and she immediately began offering details of their day and home life like I was already an old family friend.

It was Texas-style graciousness.

When Lilly got on the line, he described the viciousness of those piles. 

“A lot of the guys I played with were gentlemen off the field but something happened to a man in that scrum,” the big defensive tackle recalled. “It was really dog eat dog.”

Cowboy teammate Lee Roy Jordan told me that he tried his best to protect, the smaller more-vulnerable players from all that man meat.

“I always tried to protect my guys as best I could. From what went on in the pile to those guys who swooped in like bullets,” he said. “I’d get in a position to knock somebody off or make sure they didn’t hit one of my teammates with their helmet. It was war, without all the rules they have now.”

Cliff Harris was cool. I mean, he was the coolest of the cool.

He was gracious and articulate, giving me all the time I needed.

In a followup call, he said he’d checked out my personal website and that he liked my writing. Then he sent me a photograph (included here) from his collection of classic fumble pileups involving his Cowboy brethren.

Cliff was real. He described how even the most seasoned pros genuflected to the pure meanness of players like Ray Nietchke and Dick Butkus.

“The team would be watching game film and we’d see Dick Butkus on defense,” he said. “Suddenly, he’d do something really violent and the entire room would collectively gasp “Oh my gosh!”

These were the players, not the cheerleaders.

And he told a personal story about Nietchke.

“When I was a rookie playing in the Cotton Bowl, Nietchke was trying to make a tackle and rolled into our sideline and right into our bench,” he said. “I jumped up and said to him “Can I help you up Mr. Nietscke? And you what he did? He just growled at me.”

As I listened, I was as much of a fan as a reporter.

I told Bob Lilly, “Do you know how many crocodile tears you brought from Upstate New York kids like me when you’d beat the our Giants time and again on some improbable last minute play.”

But Bob was humble.

“Well,” he drawled. “They beat us as many times as we beat them.”

As the interviews mounted, I began to play a game of NFL tag team.

I’d call a number for one player, have a few laughs, and then at the end of our conservation, ask him for a number of one of his glory-days pals. 

I got Jim Tunney’s name, though, from a sportswriter. 

Jim is in his 90s now, but is still known as the Dean of the NFL Referees. More than that, he’s an erudite scholar of football. 

“There’s nothing you can see directly,” he said as a ref peering into the pile. “The fighting is over by the time you get down there to the bottom. But in a lot of cases, it does change possession down there. The ball gets pulled away, and the guy who first had it has lost it. It’s your job to keep law and order.”

Then my interviewees quickly turned from old-school gentlemen to the certifiably crazy.

I talked to Fred Smerlas.

In our talk, Fred was a raunchy stand-up comic, the riffs coming so rapid-fire that I kicked myself for not taping our conversation. I can usually keep up with even the fastest talkers while typing on the keyboard. But Smerlas was just so crazy, so ruthlessly funny, that I wanted to stop typing and listen, and laugh. But I couldn’t; I was working.

He said all NFL teams had player bounties back in his day, but that they tried to take guys out with legal hits, so you wouldn’t get penalized.

He called it “pioneer justice.”

“As soon as that ball drops, if I’m away from the play, I’m gonna hold my guy to make sure he can’t get there. Inside, you can hear the 250-pound linebackers coming in like jets, smashing into your back and your legs. Guys with heads like small Volvos.”

Smerlas said he never feared any man on the football field.

Except one.

Conrad Dobler.

“Guys like Conrad Dobler would bite your eyeballs out,” Smerlas said. “Conrad would eat a child, for God sakes. He had no conscience. He’d tape his hands and rub them in salt and go after your eyes. He was like a crab. Everything on him was going to hurt you. If the ball was on the ground, he would punch you in the ribs or in the throat. You could beat Conrad to death, he wouldn’t care.”

By the end of Dobler’s career, he said, he could barely walk, having endured nine knee replacements after the integrity of his bones weakened and gave way.

“But back in the late 1970s, when football lockers included ash trays, Dobler would gobble down hits of speed, Black Beauties and Robin’s eggs, and all of a sudden he was Speedy Gonzales,” Smerlas said.

Once, during practice, when he teased Dobler, the big man ran into the locker room, took ten hits of speed, and chased him around the field.

This, I knew, was good stuff. The Dobler riffs were classic.

But they also presented a problem.

I couldn’t just let Smerlas and others wax on about Dobler’s evil ways without having comebacks from Satan himself. 

I knew I had to reach Dobler. 

But how?

Nobody I knew had any idea where Dobler might be lurking. So late one afternoon, I got on the Internet and began looking for old agents or some other contacts. 

I came across a medical supply company in suburban Kansas City with a CEO named Dobler, as in Conrad.

Before throwing in the towel for the day, I gave the number a call, thinking that I would leave a message and have a place to start the following morning. After all, it was already 8 p.m. in the Midwest.

The line rang once.

Then somebody picked it up.

The voice sounded breathless, irked. It appeared so suddenly that it startled me, like a cheap hit in the fumble scrum. 

“Conrad Dobler,” it said.

No. it couldn’t be. Nothing in life came this easy.

I stumbled for words, Finally, something came of my mouth.

“It’s you!” I said.

It was indeed, the man labeled the dirtiest player in all of pro football.

He was working late that night, he said. There was a computer tech in his office, fixing some glitch. He was not in a good mood.

But sure, he finally said, he’d talk to me.

He made no excuses for his style of play. Or his reputation.

The way Conrad saw things, all the good nicknames were taken: Joe Green had already put his bear paw on mean. Guys were already rough and tough. The only one left was “dirtiest,” so that was that.

In the end, Conrad said, he owned the phrase.

The dirtiest player in pro football.

Well, if the cleat fits …

“Were we rougher than the guys who play now? Who knows?” he said. “The people who played before us always said they were tougher than we were. But I do know this: When we played, there was no place to hide between the white lines. You get no mercy. I made a guy cry once.”

There’s a joke journalists tell — to track down the untrackable interview, all you have to do is punch the right digits into your phone number pad, and, voila!

I found my story’s version of God, or the Devil, depending on your point of view.

And it was Conrad Dobler, the guy who wore horns on his helmet.

There were other classic quotes, many of which never made the story.

Tampa Bay Buccaneers and New York Jet defensive end Stephen White, for example, talked some trash about ex-teammate Nate Webster. “Even though he was on your team, you had to watch for Nate in the pile. He couldn’t tell it was you and you’d get assaulted,” he said.

“He was known for hitting guys in the nuts. One game against Atlanta, the guy who did the Dirty Bird touchdown dance, Jamal Anderson, Nate kept hitting him in the nuts under the pile, to the point that the guy complained to our head coach ofter the game. But it didn’t matter to Nate.”

San Francisco 49er Gary Plummer said he spit in player’s faces. And that’s when he was being nice.

“One night when we played the Tampa Bay Bucs, Eric Davis intercepted the ball and Tyji Armstrong made the tackle. He stood up and lifted Eric off the ground by his foot and was literally twisting his ankle and knee. I was ten yards away and came flying over. It looked like something out of WWF,” he said. “I knocked him to the ground and we went at it. They were trying to pull us apart and I literally had a handful of his junk.

“You know what I’m talking about. And I wouldn’t let go. To this day I’m surprised it didn’t get ripped off his body. He was literally trying to ruin somebody’s career. I was thrown out of the game and got a $10,000 fine. Eric Davis later told me that he appreciated what I’d done and promised to pay my fine. He didn’t. But it was still worth it.”

Reggie Williams, a 14-year NFL veteran with the Cincinnati Bengals, said he had to learn how to be such an intimidator on the gridiron.

“I was a psych major at Dartmouth and I did my senior thesis on the pre-combine ways to differentiate players by position. But despite all that psychology, when I got to the NFL I had to change my receptivity to pain and learn how to deal with brutal, nasty mean people,” he said.

“I had to put myself in harm’s way and do it eagerly, especially in the fumble pileup, because that’s where football is life and death.”

I didn’t get interviews everybody I set out to get.

Dick Butkus wouldn’t talk to me; he rarely speaks to anyone these days, let alone nosy reporters. John Madden didn’t respond to my emails, or my repeated phone pleas with his PR people, which sort of broke my heart.

I really wanted to be able to quote the big man saying he words “Boom! Boom! Boom!”

Alas, it was not to be.

Yet I still consider the Dobler interview as one of my most surprising journalistic sleights of hand. When I’m in my rocking chair, in my reveries, I’ll still hear that line ring just once.

And then, suddenly, will come that voice that made grown men quiver, including myself.

Conrad Dobler.